OLAF'S GREATEST HITS: Gerry Adams (2003)

I had been despatched to Belfast to interview the then-and-now Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams in his Falls Road office. He had just published his book Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland, and our meeting had been organised by his publishers.
I had – and still have - extremely mixed feelings about Adams. The man definitely has certain strong qualities that I can’t help but admire. Having said that, I don’t believe him for a nanosecond when he claims that he has never been the leader of the IRA. For better or worse, though, he’s undeniably an extremely important Irishman – and will always be remembered as such.
If I had to walk a mile in his shoes, I’m not sure I’d be able to cope (but then army boots always hurt my heels). If he had to walk a mile in mine, his comrades would disown him for wearing such poncey footwear. But I digress…
A polite, convivial and formidably intelligent individual, Adams actually fairly bored me during the early stages of our meeting. Aware that I was a Hot Press journalist, he freely namedropped the likes of U2, Horslips, Van, Ash, Westlife and Boyzone. We weren’t there to talk about them.
As an interviewer, I generally tend to favour the softly-softly approach. I genuinely hadn’t planned on going for Adams’ jugular by asking if he felt any sympathy for Osama bin Laden, but it happened anyway. One minute we were chatting away, both comfortably playing our respective professional roles; the next we were snarling at each other like angry dogs.
(*)
OLAF TYARANSEN: Do you have any sympathy for Osama bin Laden?
GERRY ADAMS: Not really (room temperature drops significantly).
OT: Surely his struggle isn’t a million miles from yours?
GA: I think that when you contemplate and are part of the type of actions that led to the Twin Towers and those other attacks – at one level it could be argued that that gives you an insight into the…
OT: Well, it’s not that different from a lot of IRA actions.
GA: Well, it is! (annoyed)
OT: Only in terms of scale.
GA: No, no, no. There is a total difference. You have to remind yourself that we’re into the tenth year, next year, of IRA cessation. The IRA has been at peace for a very, very, very long time. When the IRA killed civilians – and this is not to either justify it or to excuse it – it has been by mistake.
OT: That’s not true!
GA: It is true!
OT: The IRA have directly targeted innocent civilians at various points!
GA: When? (snaps).
OT: Well, when you plant a bomb on the Shankill Road, or plant a bomb on Canary Wharf, or plant a bomb under Hammersmith Bridge, surely that’s going to kill civilians!
GA: Well, first of all, it’s always interesting to me that 10 years into the peace process, we talk about war. If you attack a target with the sole objective of killing the people in it… Now I’ve repudiated the bombing in the Shankill Road. The bombing in the Shankill Road was an attack upon the leadership of the UDA. Now it was an incompetent operation because people were…
OT: Walking around a crowd with a big bomb. Which then went off!
GA: Of course, but that’s different from what you said! Which is targeting civilians. It was a mistake. What happened in New York wasn’t a mistake. What happened in New York was a deliberate attempt to…
OT: So you’re saying that the IRA have never, ever, deliberately targeted civilians.
GA: Not to my knowledge. You tell me – you’re the journalist!
OT: I’m just trying to think. There are so many instances…
GA: The IRA has killed civilians – and, as I say, I’m not trying to justify or excuse that – but to try and put the IRA in the same camp as [Osama bin Laden]…
OT: I’m just saying that the methods aren’t entirely different.
GA: Well, a better example is Hiroshima. Not a small guerrilla organisation in this country. That’s a better example. Dresden is a better example, where the objective was to kill civilians. Bloody Sunday is a better example, where the clear objective was to kill civilians. Which isn’t to say – and I’m stressing this – that everything the IRA did was excusable or otherwise. And I think that one of the big achievements is that hopefully all of this is gonna be a thing of the past.
(*)
At this point our conversation was interrupted by SF spin-doctor Richard McAuley, who apologetically entered the room with a book for Adams to autograph. This is not the done thing during interviews, and it was only afterwards that I realised that the room was probably bugged, and McAuley had been listening in all along. He and Adams had a brief whispered conversation before we resumed. Things were quite tense for the remainder of the interview but, towards the end, I asked the following question…
OT: What has been the lowest point of your life?
GA: Apart from this interview?
At that point, we both burst into laughter.
I was still glad to get out of there…

Here's the blow-by-blow account of that memorable day...

THE HOT PRESS INTERVIEW: Gerry Adams

There’s no pipe of peace – in fact no pipe at all from the non-smoking sinn féin leader – as Olaf Tyaransen asks if, given Osama Bin Laden’s use of terror as a political weapon, Gerry Adams might not have some sympathy for the world’s most wanted man. that question and other contentious queries relating to the IRA, Jean McConville and the murder of Garda Jerry McCabe are dealt with in an interview which also takes in Eoghan Harris, George Bush and Bono, and ends with the interviewee humming a familiar Monty Python tune.

I hadn’t intended to go all uber-Unionist and start haranguing Gerry Adams during this interview, but it just sort of happened. One minute we were chatting away, both comfortably playing our respective professional roles, the next we were snarling at each other like angry dogs.

In my defence, I’d spent all of the trip to Belfast and much of the previous 24-hours frantically speed-reading my way through the 400-page manuscript of his soon-to-be-published tome on the perfidious peace process. I haven’t read any of Adams’ other eleven published works, but I sincerely hope they’re more enjoyable than Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland. Bar the occasional humorous anecdote (like when he realises his trouser fly is open during an important American press conference), the book is a frustratingly slow, torturous and complicated read – hardly surprising given that it details a frustratingly slow, torturous and complicated process. Historically speaking, it’s obviously an important document, but it’s still far from riveting reading. By the time I’d finished it, my brain had gone numb. No wonder I was cranky.

On the other hand, maybe it was my youthful conditioning kicking in. Growing up and going to school in the west of Ireland, the combined forces of Church, State and Media left me in absolutely no doubt that the bearded, speccy four-eyed Sinn Fein leader was the most dangerous man in Ireland, the devil incarnate, so vile and corruptive that even the sound of his voice couldn’t be broadcast, lest listeners fell under his evil spell. It seems amazing to me that it’s less than a decade since Michael D. Higgins dropped Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act and allowed us to hear how Adams actually sounded (pretty much like the actors that the BBC and RTE had employed to speak his words, as it turned out).

It wasn’t until I got out into the real world myself that I began to suspect that maybe the Northern Ireland issue wasn’t quite as black and white as all the propaganda had led me to believe. Yes, the IRA committed terrible atrocities – but the Loyalists were just as bad. Yes, they were an illegal army – but the British security forces seemed to be regularly engaging in illegal acts themselves. And yes, they bombed their way to the negotiating table – but would they have got there any other way?

Luckily for me, I live in the Republic, where such questions aren’t really pressing everyday concerns and it’s easy to make lazy judgements without having to confront any stark realities. It’s only when you’re around seventy minutes outside of Dublin and start to spot the hillside military installations that it gets brought home to you that, even nine years into a peace process, the North is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

This tightly scheduled interview takes place on the afternoon of Thursday, September 17th, in a cluttered upstairs office in Sinn Fein’s Falls Road headquarters. Adams is slightly taller than I’d expected but not a particularly intimidating presence. In fact, he’s charm and politeness personified, and seems genuinely interested when he asks me where I got my name from. With grey-flecked, healthily sheened hair and beard, and casually attired in an open-neck blue shirt, suit trousers and expensive shoes, the 55-year-old West Belfast MP looks relaxed and rested. For a while, anyway…

OT: You’re a pipe-smoker, aren’t you?

GA: No. I haven’t smoked in about fifteen years.

OT: There goes my question about whether a smoking ban in the Republic put you off the idea of wanting to be part of a united Ireland?

GA: I support the smoking ban. Well, I think that, in fairness, people who want to have a smoke should have a facility to be able to. But I think that those of us who don’t smoke shouldn’t have to be beset with passive smoking. This is a row between me and my wife, who smokes [smiles]. But one of the best things I’ve done in terms of my own personal life is to stop smoking. Without going on about smoking, it’s an addiction and it’s very hard to get over it. But I’m really pleased I don’t smoke anymore.

OT: How did you find time to write this book?

GA: This book was 18 months behind deadline. I find that I actually only start to write properly under the imperative or the sanction of a deadline. This book wouldn’t even have been finished if Richard McAuley [SF press officer] hadn’t read all of the minutes of meetings and the records of the meetings. So the need to cross reference, to check sources, to make sure you’re accurate with dates, is hugely time consuming. What we actually ended up doing, at one point, was we took ourselves off. I have taken time out – two or three days out – to write. A lot of the time, during low periods of activity here, I was writing. And I was writing bigtime – 18 hours a day just writing continuously.

OT: Was it heavily legalled?

GA: The publisher does all that, you know. There’s nothing in it at all that’d give rise… The American publisher sent back a few queries about different bits and pieces, but it was mostly stuff about Brian Nelson [British intelligence agent] or bits that were alleging that so and so was a British agent and involved in such and such a thing. But most of the effort would have been in trying to untie the strands of different parts of the dialogue, and to try and tell it in a way that the reader would find comprehensible.

OT: No easy task…

GA: No. Because this business of what I described as “balls in the air” where, you know, at a time under Thatcher we were talking to the Brits through Martin [McGuinness], we were talking to John Hume through me, we were talking to Dublin through the Sagart [Fr. Alec Reid}, we were reaching out to people in the States – and it was all sort of happening at the one time. There was a lot of rewriting of the book around the times of intense activity – where I was just trying to make it make sense to somebody reading it.

OT: It does get a bit monotonous at times.

GA: I opted to keep a lot of the tedium in it, because I thought that, even if it wasn’t electrifying reading, for a reader who was committed to reading the book it sort of almost induced him into (the realisation) that the process at times was just boring.

OT: Actually, I feel really sorry for the history students of the future. There are so many twists and turns, and stops and starts, that I’d hate to have to cram it all in for an exam.

GA: I think, in a funny way, in the broad stroke of history writing this would all be reduced to a page. And I think that’s the difference between the reality. You know, you read that the Good Friday Agreement was signed whenever it was signed, you read that John F. Kennedy brought in some law or about the famous speech he made, you don’t read about the ten years that preceded it. You read that Nelson Mandela was released from prison but you don’t read about the years of background negotiations. Part of the motivation for me in writing the book was because I have for a long time been championing within the community I come from the need for people to write their own history. So part of the motivation in writing this book was to get a republican version or tale or story of our contribution to the process. And to date it at a point that most people would not have been really aware of. The thing that struck me in writing it was that from the time, for example, that Fr. Wilson, Fr. Reid and myself and others started chatting about stuff, it took ten years before we were meeting John Hume. So the time that it all took really surprised me, reading back over it all and through the papers. I mean, Cathal Daly and I were involved in a public debate – and it went on for nine years. So just the time it took, that’s the point I’m trying to make.

OT: Could any of it stem from the need to get your own version of the story out there before anything happens to you? I don’t mean to ruin your day or anything but. . .

GA: No, no – not at all. Go on.

OT: Just that you’ve been shot twice already and a lot of people really don’t like you…

GA: Well… who? [coldly stares me out for a moment and then bursts out laughing]. Ha! There’s a queue!

OT: You mention in the book that you kept the ring-pull of the hand grenade thrown at you as a keyring. Do you have it here?

GA: I don’t have it with me, but I do have it at home.

OT: Is it a strain living under the threat of assassination 24 hours a day?

GA: Well, I’ve been blessed with very bad assassins [smiles]. No, I don’t want to make light of it but at the same time I have to say that it doesn’t intrude into my thinking on an ongoing basis. You become almost routinised in taking security precautions.

OT: Do you have a permanent home you can go to?

GA: I do. But I still, in the course of the peace process, am very conscious that, say in South Africa, leading elements in the process were killed when they least expected it. That the whole situation in the Middle East remains dangerous even as they enter a process. So I take security precautions, but I get on with life. And one of the things that’s in the book is where I describe how a guy who was a very dear friend of mine Cleaky Clark – he’s died since – was asked by us to take responsibility for looking after Sinn Fein, and Cleaky sort of built up a little structure. I mean when we went first to Stormont it was like going into the lion’s den. Really, the barbarians were within the gates. Now it’s routine and now people take us there. So we are looked after to a certain degree. But having said that, Martin McGuinness was attacked a month ago, up in Ballymoney, and the people who attacked him got into the car.

OT: Are you licensed to carry a gun?

GA: No. They probably wouldn’t give me one. I remember applying for one just for the craic [grins].

OT: What stage is the peace process at right now?

GA: As we speak, we’re trying to put it together. We’re dealing with the two governments and with the UUP. I think there’s a lot of grumpiness around in republicanism. I think that the decision to cancel the elections just really compounded difficulties caused by the rejection of the various initiatives which came just before that. We had been pressing the governments to accept – and the Irish government has accepted – that the accelerator for trying to recontextualise the process has to be an election. But without that you won’t get people… people will just see it as the Brits screwing about. And I think it’ll be very clear within the next few weeks whether we win that argument. I would like to think – and I know Blair fairly well – that he’s reflected on this decision over the summer and he’s come to the conclusion – I would like to think – that the elections should go ahead.

OT: Are you following the Hutton Inquiry closely?

GA: Just a marginal interest in it. I’m not really keeping up with the detail of it at all.

OT: Are you not concerned that maybe Blair won’t be prime minister in six months?

GA: Well, I met him last week and he told me he intends to be [laughs].

OT: You seem very relaxed today. Are you in good form?

GA: Ah, I’m only after a very good break. I’d a good break away – and it just hasn’t got to me yet! In a week’s time I’ll look like Tony Blair [laughs].

OT: How does dealing with President Bush compare to dealing with Clinton?

GA: Well, I actually keep in touch with Clinton and we talk fairly often. Because he’s clearly still moving in circles and dealing with people, and the more he’s informed about the process here, the better. The difference in style is totally different. Maybe it isn’t so much a difference of style because they are both very personable people. Both Bush and Blair are very down to earth and easy to talk to. The last time I met Bush I gave him a letter in protest at the Iraqi war and we spent most of the conversation around me saying that they shouldn’t be going into Iraq. It’s madness, and they weren’t gonna get out of it easy, and they should’ve went to the UN…

OT: How did he take that?

GA: Oh, he was fair enough. He took it. He actually said to me, ‘My only concern is that people shouldn’t be thinking we’re doing this just because we can do it’. He said, ‘We are trying to bring about an end to a bad regime’. So he took it OK. But I haven’t talked to Bush since, while I’ve talked to Bill Clinton maybe three times since then. The style mightn’t be any different and maybe… Under Clinton the Irish peace process was in the White House. It’s now in the State Department. Having said that, the guy handling it, Richard Haas, has been very good. Very fair, balanced, easy enough to deal with.

OT: Richard Haas is an avowed imperialist, isn’t he?

GA: Well, obviously this is a government which has a world view of itself… We’ve talked to the Bush administration about Afghanistan, about Iraq, about the Middle East, about a lot of Third World issues as well. But what people in struggle – and I think this is true of people anywhere who’re involved in serious struggle – all understand is that their own cause has to be the one which they pursue. So we would raise the issue of the plight of the Palestinians with the US and British governments, but the people in the leadership of the struggle in that country would understand that our first issue is the cause of Ireland.

OT: What if the Israelis assassinate Yasser Arafat?

GA: Oh, I think what they’re threatening is absolutely disgraceful and it hasn’t even got to do with Yasser Arafat at all, it’s got to do with the rights of the people there to choose their own leader. And everyone just has to recognise that. If you don’t recognise that, it’s pure madness! But then it’s also totally counterproductive. This is not going to persuade people in the Arab world that the Israelis are serious about a peace process. I think it’s disgraceful and I do think the US should make it very, very, very clear that they are not going to put up with it.

OT: Do you have any sympathy for Osama bin Laden?

GA: Not really [room temperature drops significantly].

OT: Surely his struggle isn’t a million miles from yours?

GA: I think that when you contemplate and are part of the type of actions that led to the Twin Towers and those other attacks – at one level it could be argued that that gives you an insight into the…

OT: Well, it’s not that different from a lot of IRA actions.

GA: Well, it is! [annoyed]

OT: Surely it’s killing innocent people to make your point?

GA: There is a difference between them.

Only in terms of scale. No, no, no [shakes head]. There is a total difference. You have to remind yourself that we’re into the tenth year, next year, of IRA cessation. The IRA has been at peace for a very, very, very long time. When the IRA killed civilians – and this is not to either justify it or to excuse it – it has been by mistake.

OT: That’s not true!

GA: It is true!

OT: The IRA have directly targeted innocent civilians at various points!

GA: When? [snaps]

OT: Well, when you plant a bomb on the Shankill Road or plant a bomb on Canary Wharf or plant a bomb under Hammersmith Bridge, surely that’s going to kill civilians!

GA: Well, first of all, it’s always interesting to me that ten years into the peace process, we talk about war. If you attack a target with the sole objective of killing the people in it… Now I’ve repudiated the bombing in the Shankill Road. The bombing in the Shankill Road was an attack upon the leadership of the UDA. Now it was an incompetent operation because people were…

OT: Walking around a crowd with a big bomb. Which then went off!

GA: Of course, but that’s different from what you said! Which is targeting civilians. It was a mistake. What happened in New York wasn’t a mistake. What happened in New York was a deliberate attempt to…

OT: So you’re saying that the IRA have never ever deliberately targeted civilians.

GA: Not to my knowledge. You tell me – you’re the journalist!

I’m just trying to think. There are so many instances…

The IRA has killed civilians – and, as I say, I’m not trying to justify or excuse that – but to try and put the IRA in the same camp as-

OT: I’m just saying that the methods aren’t entirely different.

GA: Well, a better example is Hiroshima. Not a small guerilla organisation in this country. That’s a better example. Dresden is a better example, where the objective was to kill civilians. Bloody Sunday’s a better example, where the clear objective was to kill civilians. Which isn’t to say – and I’m stressing this – that everything the IRA did was excusable or otherwise. And I think that one of the big achievements is that hopefully all of this is gonna be a thing of the past.

[Our conversation is suddenly interrupted by SF spin doctor Richard McAuley entering the room with a book (not the new one) for Adams to autograph. They have a brief whispered conversation as Adams signs the book before McAuley apologises and departs]

OT: Are you happy about the Bloody Sunday Inquiry?

GA: Well, I think it was one of the good things that Blair did. Arguably you wouldn’t need such an inquiry because the relatives want the truth, and the truth lies within the British system. So as a process for finding the truth, I don’t see another example of a British prime minister after maybe twenty plus years of campaigning by families actually saying, ‘OK, let’s do this’. I think it was good and I said so at the time.

OT: How would you feel about an inquiry into the disappearance of Jean McConville?

GA: I think that families have the right to truth, and if that will find the truth then go-ahead. I don’t have any problem with that.

OT: A lot of people are saying that you personally ordered her kidnapping.

GA: You’d have to tell me who said it [glares].

OT: Well, this is dogs on the street sort of stuff.

GA: No, no, but you see I got interviewed about this very recently and journalists were saying to me, ‘It’s said that you knew about this’. And then I went and got the Sunday Independent where the story was. And one journalist was quoted as saying, ‘It’s inconceivable’.(that Adams didn’t know). Right. And then you come along and say ‘a lot of people’ say. So you’re the journalist. I was not involved.

OT: Well, hard facts in this business are very hard to find.

GA: Well then phrase your question. ‘Hard facts are hard to find’, it was suggested by a reporter [sarcastic].

OT: OK – did you order the kidnapping of Jean McConville?

GA: No. Not at all.

OT: Did you have any idea where she was buried?

GA: The information which led to what I hope are the remains of Jean McConville being found arose after I met a number of families of people who’d been executed and buried secretly by the IRA. And as a result of that and a recognition by me that this was a gross injustice, there was a whole process of inquiries by the IRA which led to information being brought forward which then subsequently led… and of course there was huge trauma for the family – and the other families as well – because some of these remains have not been found. So at least in terms of Jean McConville’s remains there might be a situation where the family… At least if these remains are hers they’ll be able to go to a grave.

But I’ve met the McConville family – I can’t say I’ve met them all, but I’ve met a number of the sons and one of the daughters – and they’re very good people. They’ve been through… You know, the family lost their mother, they were thrown to the four winds, they ended up in orphanages and in care and so on, so there’s obviously a need for them to have whatever succour they can be given in the course of all of this. And if they want [an inquiry] – and our position is very, very clear in all of this and has been for a very, very long time – then we will support families in their demands. Because we don’t pick and choose, we don’t say, ‘Well, let’s have one into something the Brits did’. Everybody needs a truth process. This book’s about my story, but everybody’s got a story to tell.

OT: Writing about the disappearance of Jean McConville in the Sunday Independent, Eoghan Harris compared Sinn Fein to the Nazis. Any comment on that?

GA: I didn’t read it. I’m not even gonna respond to that [glares].

OT: You were quite critical of the Sunday Independent in the book.

GA: I didn’t comment so much on the Independent. I gave examples of how, for example, President Mary Robinson came here and the Independent had something like nine articles critical of a handshake. So the Sunday Independent was the paper which editorialised to see James Connolly executed, when he was wounded and they discovered he was the only one who hadn’t been executed. And I don’t… I mean, Eoghan Harris? Why should I dignify Eoghan Harris with a reply? He’s earning his money by insulting people and writing rubbish. I’ve more serious business to be about!

OT: How far into the future are you looking?

GA:Well, in terms of the politics of the situation, I’m looking to get through this next short period. Because that to a certain extent will dictate – or, at least, shape – the type of future we’re going to have in terms of workload. If we can move the process forward then it opens things up. We have elections, for certain, to local government in the South and European elections on the entire island in June of next year. And we have – maybe – assembly elections between now and then. So we’re going into a fairly busy period. So I would intend, once I get the book out and through the period of promoting it and all of that, to do a lot of internalised work. How much we can do in the time ahead will depend on where the peace process is. There’s a lot of party work needs to be done – party development and all of that.

OT: Would you have been a full-time writer if you hadn’t become a politician?

GA: Yeah. But I’m very much a political activist who writes. Maybe some day I’ll be a writer who was formerly known as an activist. But I don’t have any big pretensions about how good or otherwise my writing is. I’m pleased that all my stuff is still in print because it means people are still reading it. And I do enjoy the therapy of writing. I’m really pleased to get finished writing this book and I think that in its own way it’s an important enough piece of work but I enjoy fiction much more. It’s truly therapeutic to be writing short stories or stuff like that, where you don’t have to cross-reference or check dates or read stuff – you just make it up and it’s good or it’s bad or it isn’t. So I would like to continue writing if I’m able.

OT: Obviously though, even though this book claims to be your story, there are probably lots of things you couldn’t say. For example, are you now or have you ever been on the IRA army council?

GA: Nope [sighs, annoyed].

OT: Again – this is dogs on the street stuff. Still, there must have been lots of things that happened that you couldn’t write about.

OT: Well, I make the point in the introduction and the first chapter that this is my version and it isn’t the complete story because this is still stuff in process. So you’re right – there are things which can’t be said and there are people who… I mean, I’m still working with David Trimble. This book really finishes at a point where we actually weren’t working. So if you’re working with people, if you’re trying to build relationships with people for the common good, then you have to be a wee bit coy. But so far as I can, without being too, em, trivial about it, I would like to think I’ve conveyed some sense of both the boredom and the bit of craic sometimes. And the badness of it as well.

OT: What’s been the lowest point of your life?

GA: Apart from this interview? [glares fiercely for a moment and then bursts out laughing] Ha! Ha! No, I’m only joking! Em… I don’t know. The lowest point of my life? I don’t know. Other than my mother dying, in my personal life.

OT: You write in the book that you couldn’t visit the hospital on the night she died because of security reasons.

GA: Well, that didn’t actually so much phase me because I’d sort of made my mind up and that was it. I was settled on it. Just the fact that it’s a very human thing. I don’t know if your parents are still alive or even if you have parents, but it’s an experience that people have to go through – unless you die before them. So that would’ve been a low point. Clearly at times when friends were killed or when there were big atrocities. Whether it be Omagh – I mean, the Omagh bombing was after the Good Friday Agreement – whether it be the Shankill bombing or in Eniskillen. So serious things were happening in the course of all of this.

OT: Do you not become inured to these kinds of tragedies after a while?

GA: No, never. Not at all. Sure, the Shankill Road is only over there [gestures towards wall of office]. Enniskillen, I drive past the site regularly. So this is happening all around you and you don’t forget. I mean, Yeats wrote about, ‘Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart’. That isn’t true, in my view. Maybe if you’re on the margins or maybe if you’re very young or just blinkered in some way. But if you’re a serious human being who wants to lead a useful life and try and bring about change, try and be of some service, then each one of these incidents in which people have been killed – either a single person has been killed or groups of people have been killed – each one of them just sort of whacks ye. So have no doubt about that, at all. And the fact that we’re so surrounded by it. Even just here, in this office, just down the stairs, when three people were killed there [in 1992 an RUC officer, posing as a journalist, entered the building and shot three SF office workers before committing suicide]. I mean, Nora McCabe [young mother shot with a plastic bullet] was killed just two streets from here.

OT: There’s been a lot of recent controversy over Martin Ferris, Caoimhin O’Caolain and two other Sinn Fein TD’s having their photo taken in Castlerea prison with the killers of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe. Was that not an insensitive move?

GA: Well, you see there’s a campaign for the release of the Castlerea people, for the people who are in for the killing of Jerry McCabe, and I was one of the people who negotiated it. And when I negotiated for the release of prisoners, I negotiated not just for republican prisoners but also for loyalist prisoners. So I negotiated for the people who killed people around here, who killed our party members, who killed family members. And we also made very, very clear, and the governments agreed, that people who’re members or supporters of qualified organisations would be able to avail of the early release scheme.

The Castlerea prisoners fitted into that. The High Court recently said that the government is in breach of the agreement. Now the campaign to get their release is being opposed by a campaign to keep them in prison. And the McCabe family, and particularly Mrs. McCabe, are now caught up in all of that. I made the case that I am sure that this is hugely traumatising for them, and there’s no way just of dealing with that from my point of view except to express concern and compassion for her.

Neither do I want, as a political leader, to be every second interview talking about the Castlerea prisoners or Garda Jerry McCabe’s killing because I think it was reprehensible, it was something that should not have happened. So I just think that until this issue is brought to a conclusion that every so often there’s gonna be some controversy. And without sort of… Em, I just don’t buy Sunday papers anymore.

OT: I don’t blame you!

GA: Yeah! [laughs] I just stopped buying Sunday papers but the controversy started when the Sunday Independent carried the photographs. It was in the Phoblocht and there wasn’t any great squall about it and then the Sunday Indo went and used it. So as part of campaigning in all of this you’re gonna find that people involved are gonna use photographs just to try and keep the thing running. And you’re gonna find other people arguing against it.

OT: Do you think that Bono has been useful in the peace process?

GA: Well, first of all, I think he has done huge work on debt cancellation. I think he deserves great credit for that. I’ve listened to him speaking on it and he’s hugely informed, he speaks for quite a long time without notes and in great detail, and he is using his status for the benefit of other people – and people who wouldn’t have a voice. So I thank him and respect him and commend him for that. I like his music. But I think that he came at the issue of the North wrongly and I disagreed with him on that.

OT: Surely bringing Trimble and Hume together on stage in Belfast in front of a massive U2 audience at such a pivotal moment was a good thing?

GA: Well, I’m talking about before that. When the peace process kicked in, I think then that he showed a different side to his character. And I think it’s good that we can do that – that somebody who would have been seen as anti-republican was then able to come out and support a peace process. And I think what he did with David Trimble and John Hume was a good thing because he was obviously appealing to U2 fans and young people and lovers of music to come out and give this a bit of support, because that’s the future. So yes, I think he has been good.

OT: Your son is in his early twenties now. Has watching him grow up over the years changed your attitude towards the whole thing? Obviously you want your children to have a better future. . .

GA: Not really, because I come from a big family. See part of this, if I may say so, is there was always a notion that you were sort of half-mad and then you had kids and got a bit of sense. And then they have kids and you get a bit more sense. I come from a large family so there’s always kids around. So you’re always conscious of the future, you’re always conscious that there has to be hope in this situation.

OT: What’s your greatest regret in life?

GA: My greatest regret in life? I don’t know. I mean, I wouldn’t call it my greatest regret but I suppose the fact that it took so long to get a peace process together. The fact that so many people have been killed. The fact that people are still hurting would all be part of, I suppose, a sense of where we’re at. But I said this to you earlier, I do feel extremely lucky and I do intend to use whatever sort of influence or whatever little talent I have to try and continue to bring about change. And when I come to the end of all of that then I may be able to make sense of your question. But I don’t sit back and consider over things and put up a list of plusses and minuses. We have been part of bringing about change and that’s been good.

OT: Do you see permanent peace in Northern Ireland happening in your lifetime?

GA: Absolutely! But I think it should not be taken for granted. I think if we underestimate the difficulty, we will just make awful mistakes. I think we have to be single-minded and the micro-management is hugely important, and we have to be very cautious, because what we’re trying to do is unprecedented. But I think if we continue to do it and continue to apply ourselves that we will succeed.

And I certainly see peace in my lifetime and if we just for a second reflect that while for some people, particularly families who’ve had loved ones killed in the last five, six years, and for a year or two there people living in interfaith areas had things made much worse, but for the vast majority of people things are much better. There are hundreds of people still alive who would’ve been dead and there are kids now who have some hope, where beforehand they were going into a prison cell. And I think all of that’s to the good so we just have to keep at it.

OT: Do you have a motto in life?

GA: Always look on the bright side… That’s where you’re supposed to go [starts humming the Monty Python tune] Da-Doo… Da-Doo-Da-Doo-Da-Doo! [laughs].